Al Monus

Keep in mind it’s easy to get around the world. Keep in mind your education continues and improves as you meet people of other cultures and other lands. And make sure that you make friends. You do it by questions and by learning words from them, but you show friendship. I emphasize that, make friends and it’ll go a long ways.

Al Monus

My name is Al Monus. I was born on July the 5th, 1920. I was born in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada on a farm. My grandparents and my father left Hungary and came on the same boat that was asked to the rescue the Titanic. I had to leave home when I was 14 years of age because there was no high school near by. So I had my high school in a city in western Canada. From there I went on to university in eastern Canada.

I was interested in cultures and in their languages that they express what they believe and what they do. It wasn’t long before I was making my plans to go to a foreign country. I love travel. On one of my first trips I went out on a freighter. My first stop was in Egypt. I decided that wherever I go, I wanted to make friends. The next stop was in Arabia. My destination was India. I went to India to learn their language and to learn their culture. I went to the north and learned the national Hindi language. And I became fluent in it.

The next time that I went back, I saw that only a few people can read. There were some people who came to me and said, “There is no alphabet in our language. How are we going to be able to read that language that’s not ours, and we don’t have an alphabet in our language?” I went back to America and they said the only way you can learn it is by getting some training on living among these people who don’t have an alphabet in their language. So I heard of a group that had a boot camp in Mexico. We learned to live there and that’s how we would have to live when we went to these people who had no alphabet, no writing.

Then they sent us back to India. It was a challenge to learn their language and then we had methods by which we could reduce or make what we learned into an alphabet. And from that alphabet, teach them how to read their own language that they spoke except that by having an alphabet, this was written down. That was a great experience as well. The hardest part was that if you wanted to learn their language, they didn’t want to give you the words. They were afraid that you’re stealing. They called us Word Stealers. And so they refused to give us the words.

At first I worked with a non-profit organization. We worked with the government of that country and they cooperated with us to give us every facility to see that that alphabet gets produced and gets rolling. I went to the University of North Dakota and the first job was to learn all the sounds that a human being makes. There are 330 sounds that human beings make in the world.

I was asked to go with a man from Pakistan to visit Pakistan in 2008. I saw that many of the children, when they got to a certain age, the parents couldn’t keep them any longer, so they just went out on the streets. We decided that that wasn’t good for these children to be on the streets and so we decided to start an orphanage. It wasn’t long before we had 29 children brought in off the streets. We had to feed them, clothe them, and give them shelter. We had to raise funds. We had to find a teacher who would teach them. The orphanage is going well. Our interests and our vision are both alive and well and it centers on helping the poor children of Pakistan.